Gameplay feature #01

So we promised we would be posting something a bit more gameplay heavy this week, and we have provided! Here is an overview of some of the mechanics that the game will have and why we think they will be awesome!

     Swapping characters      

If you’ve played the Lost Vikings, you’ll be somewhat familiar with this mechanic – you swap between the game’s two main characters and with their own set of unique abilities they must work together two progress through the labyrinth.

Why is this awesome?
it will force the player to consider each character’s position in order to solve the game’s puzzle. You don’t see this too often in video games and we’re eager to see what puzzles we can come up with for you guys!

  Bombs  

Earl, who’s the more technical of the two will be able to use bombs, blow stuff up – do we need to say more? We are thinking of other ways of using the bombs though, so look forward to hearing more about this in the future.

Why is this awesome?
Do we really need to explain this? *whispers* explosions.

  Rope Tool  

Not the final name, nor graphic, but it explains what it is very well. The rope tool is very handy as it lets you traverse gaps and pull objects from far away among other things. This is Mo’s tool and when he uses it Earl can cross the gaps with ease.

Why is this awesome?
It can really help make the puzzles a lot smarter – of course, it all comes down to the designers, but we’re confident they can pull of some clever puzzles for you to enjoy!

 

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Next week will be a surprise update (read: we haven’t decided yet – so stay tuned and find out)

Also a reminder that the easter egg hunt is still on-going over at www.retrogenestudio.com – on person has found the easter egg, but you can still grab second and third place an be one of the first to enter the egg hunter’s hall of fame. Also be sure to check out Ready Player One which we have based this game of easter egg hunting on.

Graphics, bloopers and more!

Another week, another update, this time we’re showing off some work in progress game graphics and some other things as well!

A sample scene just to test out the assets including bad lighting, lightbleeds and a temporary capsule-mesh standing in for Earl. I don’t think it’s necessary to state that this is WIP

Note to self: When exporting an updated mesh from blender, remember to tick of that one box that says “export selected”, unless of course you want to export the entire scene you’re working with.

Here are the four pieces that we will be constructing the Dungeon wastes with, there will of course be more assets to break it up with, but these are the basics. The textures for the short wall isn’t perfectly tileable yet, but we’ll work something out.

 

That’s it for this week, next week we’ll do a post on gameplay, and while you’re still here, you should check out our updated website! We’re even holding a small contest over there!

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CONTEST DETAILS

We’ve hidden an easter egg on our website, if you can find it (and believe us you’ll know when you’ve found it), take a screenshot of it, post it to mail@retrogenestudio.com with the subject description: “easter egg”. There’s a small, but fun prize for the one that is the first to find it, so head over to retrogenestudio.com and test your egg hunting skills! You can also read about this on facebook page!

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Environment Art

Root Road

The Dungeon Wastes

Time for an update!

Much has been going on over the past few months, and It’s time to give you guys an update! So where to start? Why not from the very beginning?

In January we were lucky enough to have student called Anette Aga for a full month. She gave us a lot of nice illustration to flesh out the story of the game and if you look down below, there’s a few samples. Of course we can’t show it all, they’re a bit secret after all!

 

We’ve been working with nailing down the game mechanics, and we finally got a programmer on our team too, who of course told us that all our code should be reworked – not really a big surprise, but at least he could use what was there to know what he needed to make! So development has taken a pretty big step up over the past few weeks after his joining the team, and that is pretty sweet!

In one of our earliest posts you can see what kind of visual direction the game will be taking, while below you can see what it looks like right now, it ain’t pretty, but there’s a lot of functionality there, and so much more is to come!

The red and blue capsule are the two characters you can swap between. The rest is a lot of random test walls, pitfalls, wind emitters, doors, buttons, heavy pushable boxes and so forth! There’s going to be a lot of fun stuff to do in the game, and look forward to some real brain-teasers when the game’s done!

The red and blue capsules in the above picture are supposed to be a merry duo of old treasure hunters called Mo and Earl. They’ve both been created and although they might undergo some minor tweaking, here’s what they pretty much look like in the game:

 

We’ll be more frequent with our updates in the future, so stay tuned for more!